The end of another year in document management, and what a year it was. There really was something for everyone from SharePoint, to HP and Autonomy, from open source to enterprise CMS. Here are some of what we think are the highlights of the year. Undoubtedly you’ll have others, so let us know and maybe we can get a second list up and running in the New Year.

1. OpenText Gets Certified

For OpenText, the year began on a high note for its partnership with Microsoft. Focused on GRC and compliance, their combined records management ability was endorsed with DoD 5015.02-STD certification.

With it, OpenText’s ECM Suite 2010 became the first major enterprise CMS to be given the certification, considerably extending the reach and use of both software products.

While it was clearly good for OpenText, it was also a pretty good for SharePoint 2010. Since the SharePoint 2010 release in May of last year, there had been a considerable number of arguments surrounding the merits of records management in SharePoint, and this went some way to addressing that.

2. IBM’s Symphony

With the battle intensifying to capture the Web office productivity suites market, IBM launched LotusLive Symphony for the cloud, an office suite that offers a social platform enabling simultaneous collaboration on documents in the cloud.

IBM at the time said it believed LotusLive integration would make the difference. LotusLive is IBM’s portal, offering a number of collaboration and social networking services in cloud. That might not be enough to beat the competition, which is very stiff in this space, but IBM was quite clear about what it aimed to do with Symphony.

One of those goals was to break the link between Microsoft Office desktops and business by offering something that would enable organizations to socially enable their business processes. And at the end of the year it is still trying to break Microsoft’s grip.

3. Nuxeo Gets Eclipsed

Nuxeo put its code where its mouth was. The open source document management vendor contributed its content repository technology, Nuxeo Core, to the Eclipse Foundation. The contribution aimed to spur the development of a CMIS-based content repository.

4. Is SharePoint the Future of Enterprise CMS?

Chelsi Nakano looked into the future of SharePoint -- if indeed anyone can really do that -- and saw in the shifts in shape and structure the beginnings of a new environment for managing data. Unfortunately for traditional systems, this territory comes with a set of rules that may be a bit difficult to adjust to.

To recognize where the change is taking place, it helps to look at things from a young company’s point of view, so she spoke a bit with Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box.net. Some interesting and still relevant insights here.

5. State of the Enterprise CMS Industry 2011

In April came one of the highlights of the enterprise CMS year when AIIM published its State of the Industry report for 2011. It found that, while some progress was being made in dealing with content chaos, there’s still a lot of work to be done.

According to Doug Miles, the author of the report, with improving efficiency the principal objective behind enterprise CMS deployments, 16% of those surveyed said that that they have completed an enterprise-wide enterprise CMS deployment, up from 12% last year, with a further 29% actively progressing toward it.

It also showed that in 12% of companies, the plan is to create a new, first-time on-premise enterprise CMS platform to take over from legacy content management systems and bought from a single vendor.

6. Oracle Offloads OpenOffice

In June, Oracle finally answered the question on what it was going to do with OpenOffice.org (OOo). At the beginning of the month, it decided that that it would give it to the Apache Foundation.

Oracle said the decision underlined its commitment to the “developer and open source communities” and gives it an established infrastructure to continue into the future. There were lots of other people saying lots of other things, many of which are still being repeated now. Lots more on this in the coming year.

7. HP Buys Autonomy

In August, there was what has to be the biggest acquisition of the year in the enterprise CMS space and one that is still creating some considerable ripples in the industry.

HP's third quarter earnings release confirmed the offer to acquire information management software vendor Autonomy. As CMSWire readers know, Autonomy is also the proud owner of the assets once known as Interwoven.

This made for yet another exciting purchase in the content management area and followed Oracle's acquisition of Fatwire Software, another beauty in the M&A space.

8. Alfresco Goes Mobile

Alfresco went mobile with a whole pile of new apps in the Apple App Store. Businesses of all sizes and in all industries are buying into the idea that workers are more mobile than ever before and thus need tools to help them work effectively.

And knowledge workers using content management solutions are no exception. Alfresco noted that the tablet is driving the need for cloud and social capabilities in content management.

And it also knew that the organization cannot control the devices used by employees, but that IT should instead focus on control of/securing content. The key is knowing how locked down or open the content should be and then making it available appropriately. The result: Alfresco went mobile.

9. Nuxeoworld and the Future

He looked at enterprise CMS trends and how we are going to handle a level of content that will be the equivalent of around 35 billion Libraries of Congress by 2020.

While the keynote was entitled ECM Market Trends, he dispensed with the enterprise element of the title, suggesting that the real problem over the next few years is not so much enterprise CMSes and how they develop, but rather how companies are actually going to strategize and manage content. I’ve a feeling we’ll still be debating this one next year, and the year after, and the year after….Help!

10. Magic Quadrant for Enterprise CMS

People are still mulling over this one, as the page views will testify. While the vendors that made it into the Leaders Quadrant remain the same as last year -- in alphabetical order, EMC, Hyland, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText and Oracle -- the dynamics that are driving the market are not the same.

There are many things to take from this year’s report, not least of which is the fact that, although budgets in many IT areas are under pressure, in the enterprise CMS space, growth continues. It also suggested that if your CMS was more than five years old, you should dump it.

11. The Problem With Records Management

She argued that there is a sense of frustration in the records management profession. An informal show-of-hands in a session on professional education at the recent ARMA conference showed that most of the attendees had college or university degrees in library sciences or archival studies. Few had degrees in business or technology. The problem? Records management in the 21st century is all about business and technology.

And some people really got annoyed. Some agreed, some poked at what they perceived to be holes in the central claim. And a couple took it as an opportunity to express their opinion of how SharePoint is the divine gift to business and IT professionals.

These are just some of the things we found interesting -- and many of the ones that you clearly found interesting too. But each to their own and we have no doubt that in some cases you’ll disagree. But Hey!! That’s all in the joys of content management. Happy New Year.

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